Integrating Statistical Prior Knowledge into Convolutional Neural Networks

In this work we show how to integrate prior statistical knowledge, obtained through principal components analysis (PCA), into a convolutional neural network in order to obtain robust predictions even when dealing with corrupted or noisy data. Our network architecture is trained end-to-end and includes a specifically designed layer which incorporates the dataset modes of variation discovered via PCA and produces predictions by linearly combining them. We also propose a mechanism to focus the attention of the CNN on specific regions of interest of the image in order to obtain refined predictions. We show that our method is effective in challenging segmentation and landmark localization tasks.